The howitzer crept toward the city. With his face inches from the ground, his eyes bulging and his head pounding from blood draining into it, Wirkner drifted in and out of consciousness. The sounds of speeding cars washed over him and he heard the mournful prayers of soldiers lying on the ice. Screams, machine -gun fire, and curses came at him from all sides. He fainted again and when he woke up, he was surrounded by Germans sitting beside the road. When he called weakly for help, they failed to respond. Wirkner heard the wind and gunfire but nothing from his companions. They were all dead.
The lights of a truck flashed over him and he tensed for a terrible blow, but the driver had seen him move and stopped to pick him up. Wirkner rode the rest of the way into Stalingrad, where, again on all fours, he dragged himself into a dark cellar and “switched off his mind.”
At Gumrak, Russian tanks were rolling over the runways and firing point-blank into hospital bunkers. Hundreds of German wounded died where they lay, abandoned by countrymen now stampeding into Stalingrad. Along the main road into the city, a long line of trucks and cars roared through the fog, while in the fields beside the highway, a thin line of troops sat in hip-deep snow as a rear guard protecting the disorderly retreat. Panicked at the thought of being left alone to face Soviet armor, some of them swiveled their guns around and fired into the vehicles. When a driver was hit and his truck stopped, the gunners ran to the road, pulled their victim from the front seat and drove off themselves.
On the morning of January 24, the “Road of Death” as the truckers called it, was a five-mile stretch of snow coated with frozen blood left by the passage of Sixth Army to its final positions. By now more than a hundred thousand Germans had plunged into the black basements of Stalingrad.
Cpl. Heinz Neist rode into the city on a sleigh dragged by friends. Totally exhausted, Neist shivered under a thin blanket while Russian artillery knocked down what buildings were left standing. To Neist it seemed that “everything had been annihilated.” The world was dead. He was in a state of despair.
Quartermaster Karl Binder had burrowed into the Schnellhefter Block, a series of workers’ houses just west of the tractor factory. Still the efficient organizer, Binder was trying to establish a food sharing program in his sector, but his problems defied solution. Although the Ju-52s and He-111s still were dropping supplies by parachute, most of them drifted inside Russian lines and were lost. The few that landed among the Germans were supposed to be brought immediately to central points for equal distribution, but the soldiers frequently hid them away for their own use. German military police held summary courts-martial for those found stealing and executed the offenders.
A few hundreds yards away from Binder’s refuge, in the tangled wreckage of the tractor works, tailor Wilhelm Alter was busy working on a “thing of beauty.” With a piece of brown cloth and fur from a coat collar, he was making a Cossack hat for an officer who was looking ahead to the rigors of captivity. Besides having the chance to pass the time doing something creative, Alter was especially pleased about the payment due for his labor. The officer had promised him an extra piece of bread.
In the same sector, veterinarian Herbert Rentsch had assumed command of a machine-gun company. He had also made a heartrending decision about his horse, Lore. Forced out of a balka toward the city, Rentsch went to the black mare, led her into a tunnelled-out bunker and tied her to a post. As Lore stood patiently beside her master, Rentsch patted her neck and gently stroked her emaciated flanks. When she turned her head to nuzzle his hand for food, he choked back a sob and ran away. His one hope was that the Russians would find her quickly and treat her with tenderness.
In central Stalingrad, Sgt. Albert Pflüger, despite his broken arm, set up a machine gun to interdict some side streets, then sat back to think about the future. Fully aware that the Russians had already won the battle, he conjured up the possibility that Hitler and Stalin had reached an agreement on the humane treatment of prisoners of war. Pflüger also “dreamed” that the Americans were going to intervene with Stalin to prevent the mass killings of captives.
These delusions helped immensely as he prepared himself for the ordeal he knew was coming.
“Hold out for the next few days? For what?” asked an increasing number of German officers and men as they scurried for shelter in the broken-down houses of Stalingrad. They had finally begun to question the purpose of fighting for a thousand cellars at the edge of Asia.
With the fall of Pitomnik and Gumrak, all but a tiny hard core of Nazis faced the ghastly truth. Stalingrad would be their tomb. Abandoned to a miserable fate, they vented their rage in their letters, and one of the last planes leaving the Kessel carried seven sacks of mail scribbled on toilet paper, maps, anything that passed for stationery.
At Taganrog, German military censors analyzed the letters, sorted them into appropriate categories and forwarded a report on to Berlin and the Propaganda Ministry, where Dr. Joseph Goebbels read the findings.
1. In favor of the way the war was being conducted: 2.1 percent
2. Dubious: 4.4 percent
3. Skeptical, deprecatory: 57.1 percent
4. Actively against: 3.4 percent
5. No opinion, indifferent: 33.0 percent
Nearly two out of every three writers now complained bitterly against Hitler and the High Command. But their protest was tardy and irrelevant. Fearful of the effect of these letters on the German population, Goebbels ordered the letters destroyed.{A few were saved and published after the war.}
Meanwhile, Erich von Manstein read a wireless from Stalingrad that convinced him the Sixth Army was finished.
Attacks in undiminished violence… Frightful conditions in the city area proper where about 20,000 unattended wounded are seeking shelter among the ruins. With them are about the same number of starved and frostbitten men, and stragglers, mostly without weapons…. Heavy artillery pounding the whole city…. Tractor works may possibly hold out a little longer…
Positive that Paulus had done all he could ever do, Manstein called Hitler and recommended that Sixth Army be allowed to surrender. Hitler would not consider the idea. Manstein argued that “the Army’s sufferings would bear no relation to any advantage derived from continuing to tie down the enemy’s forces…”, but the Führer repeated his claim that each hour that Paulus continued to fight helped the entire front. Then he charged that capitulation was futile. The men at Stalingrad would have no chance to survive since “the Russians never keep any agreements…”
That thought was uppermost in the minds of more than one hundred thousand Germans penned up like cattle at Stalingrad to await their executioner. Unable to control their destinies, they succumbed to the malignancy of fear, which centered around one question: “Will the Russians kill us outright or send us into slavery at some terrible Siberian prison camp?”
Few expected decent treatment. Too many had seen the butchered remains of German prisoners left on the battlefield by retreating Soviet troops. They also knew what their own countrymen had done to Russian soldiers and civilians during the occupation of the Soviet Union.
The retribution the Germans feared was real. It was taking its toll among soldiers of the puppet armies already in captivity. At the monastery town of Susdal, northeast of Moscow, Felice Bracci and Cristoforo Capone shivered in windowless barracks and waited for their captors to increase the food ration to a bare subsistence level. They waited in vain. At Susdal, men died at the rate of two hundred a day from starvation.
At Oranki Prison, Rumanian troops staggered into camps from a hundred-mile forced march and pressed their hands on lighted stoves to take away the pain of frostbite. When they pulled back their fingers, the flesh remained on the stoves and the stench made them retch. Amidst screams of torment, many fell dead. The change of temperature from the steppe to warm rooms had brought on massive heart attacks. More than a hundred bodies were hauled out of the barracks feet first. The thump, thump, thump of their heads striking the stairs kept other soldiers awa
ke for hours.
In a camp at Tambov, north of the Don, Italian soldiers crowded around a gate as Russian troops dumped cabbages from a truck onto the snow. Then thirty thousand prisoners rioted and fought each other for the food. Guards shot those they caught in the act of murder.
Chapter Twenty-nine
From January 24 on, the fighting in Stalingrad was spasmodic. Trapped in their frozen, dark cellars, German troops listened fearfully for the footfalls of Russian soldiers. Even the Russians took their time now, moving carefully in squads, in platoons, over the mounds of snow-covered wreckage. In countless minor engagements in the side streets of the city, the command “Raus! Raus!” echoed when the shooting stopped, and Germans climbed out of their holes with hands held high. The Russians kicked a few, punched others, but led most prisoners away without further incident.
Germans who witnessed these surrenders took heart. A network of runners carried the message that the enemy did not kill their captives and the news soothed many who were close to hysteria. For the moment they forgot their fear of capture while they fought another deadly struggle, the endless war with lice.
The gray parasites now dominated everyone’s life. Multiplying rapidly in the incredible filth, they swarmed from head to ankles in a voracious quest for food. Ravenous, relentless, they drove their hosts to the verge of insanity. Wherever they feasted, they left giant red welts. Worse, they infected their victims with disease.
In the wall of a balka, just south of the Tsaritsa Gorge, more than two thousand German wounded had been jammed into a Russian air raid shelter, known as the Timoshenko Bunker. Tunneled into the side of the ravine like a giant anthill, the bunker’s tiered galleries were nearly two and a half miles long. The “hospital” once had contained electric lights, ventilation, even proper drainage facilities, but those conveniences had long since been destroyed. Now it was a fetid morgue, where only the patients’ body heat brought any warmth to the damp chambers. The air was foul, heavy with sickness and rot.
Doctors who ministered to the rows of wounded noticed an alarming increase of fevers ranging from 102 to 104 degrees. Some men died raving. Chills and a tendency to lung congestion were added symptoms which pointed inexorably to a damning medical diagnosis. Unchecked, it could now complete the extermination of the Sixth Army, which had never been adequately vaccinated against typhus.
In his cellar home to the north of Railroad Station Number One, Sgt. Hubert Wirkner lay among fifty other wounded soldiers and groaned from the fever wracking his frail body. His head ached; his eyes were bloodshot. Blood dripped through the bandages on his legs and arms. He had soiled himself repeatedly and hated the smell that clung to him.
Along the walls of the cellar, a collection of manikins stared unwaveringly at the wounded Germans. Marked in ink with the outlines of female reproductive organs, they had obviously been used in a maternity training program for nurses and interns. How ironic, Wirkner thought, that he and his comrades were in a former Soviet hospital but had no doctors to care for them.
Near the Tsaritsa Gorge, the grim black walls of the NKVD prison enclosed what was left of the German Fourteenth Corps, plus the 3rd and 29th Motorized Divisions. Most of the jail itself was gutted, but on the first floor enlisted men mounted guard at the windows. From there they monitored the huge yard, in which scores of wounded soldiers lay unattended in the snow. Though these men begged for help, no one paid any attention to their pleas.
In the bowels of the prison, a group of German generals lived with a retinue of aides. One of them, Edler von Daniels had not been sober for days. Gloriously drunk, he weaved back and forth among troops lying on the damp floors. “Boys,” he shouted, “who of you is against bringing this to an end?” When nobody objected to surrender, von Daniels showered them with packs of cigarettes.
The general was one of several plotting mutiny. Generals Schlomer, Pfeiffer, Korfes, and Seydlitz had been unable to convince Paulus that further resistance was futile. Increasingly annoyed at his constant refrain: “Orders are orders,” they centered their wrath on Arthur Schmidt, the eminence grise behind the throne. Convinced that Schmidt was the culprit who insisted on insane continuation of the fighting, they were planning to end the chief of staff’s domination and force Paulus to surrender.
Arthur Schmidt was indeed assuming active leadership of Sixth Army. Paulus seemed dazed by the calamity that had overtaken him. “Sorrow and grief lined his face. His complexion was the color of ashes. His posture, so upright otherwise, was now slightly stooped….” The tic on the right side of his face now extended from jaw to eyebrow.
Schmidt, on the other hand, was a bulwark of strength, bullying defeatist officers with blunt commands, abusing protesters by phone, threatening malcontents with the firing squad. Where Paulus wilted under the enormity of the disaster, Schmidt shone in adversity.
In the early morning of January 24, General von Hartmann, commander of the 71st Division, had put down the book he was reading and said to General Pfeiffer: “As seen from Sirius, Goethe’s works will be mere dust in a thousand years’ time, and the Sixth Army an illegible name, incomprehensible to all.” With his mind settled as to his own course of action, Hartmann led a small band of men out to a railway embankment. Standing upright in full view of Russians across the snowfields, he shouted: “Commence firing!” and shot a clip of bullets from his carbine.
Col. Günter von Below hurried from Paulus’s cellar with the order to “stop this nonsense.” But Hartmann ignored him and continued to fire at the enemy. Within moments, a Russian bullet tore into his brain.
A short time later, another German general settled his own affairs. Hearing that his son, a lieutenant, had been killed while trying to lead some men out of the city toward far-off German lines, General Stempel took out a pistol and shot himself in the head.{Though badly wounded in the escape attempt, his son survived.}
Only hours after Generals Hartmann and Stempel died, the 297th Division Commander, General Drebber, stood on a street near the grain elevator and saluted a Russian colonel, who politely asked: “Where are your regiments?” Drebber shrugged and replied: “Do I have to tell you where my regiments are?” Accompanied by several aides, he marched off to Soviet lines.
Just before 9:00 A.M. that morning, Friedrich von Paulus was handed a letter sent through the lines by Drebber. As he started to open it, a bomb exploded outside the basement window and showered both him and his adjutant, Col. Wilhelm Adam, with shards of glass and rock. Shaken and bleeding, the two men submitted to medical attention before Paulus sat down again to read the note.
In a moment, the general uttered a surprised cry: “It is not believable! Drebber states that he and his men have been well received by the Red Army soldiers. They were treated correctly. We all were victims of Goebbel’s lying propaganda. Drebber urges me to give up… useless resistance and… ‘capitulate with the entire Army.’” Paulus put the letter down and stared at Adam in wonder.
At that moment Arthur Schmidt entered and when Paulus told him what Drebber had written, Schmidt’s face darkened.
“Never has von Drebber written this letter voluntarily,” he stated. “He was under compulsion….”
The chief of staff was furious at the defection of a senior officer. But Paulus was merely confused. Had he been wrong about the Russians? Was it possible they would treat every German fairly?
Just north of Mamaev Hill, behind the Red October workers’ settlement, tanks from General Batov’s Sixty-fifth Army smashed through scattered German resistance to meet troops of General Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards. The linkup on January 26 marked the first time that Vassili Chuikov’s divisions inside Stalingrad had established physical contact with another Russian army since September 10, 138 days earlier.
Rodimtsev, who had thrown his cannon-fodder division into Stalingrad on September 14 to hold the Germans between Mamaev and the Tsaritsa Gorge, spied tanker captain Usenko and cried: “Tell your commander that this is a happy day for us….” More t
han eight thousand guardsmen under his command had died in the last four months. Embracing, the general and captain wept together.
A few hours later, Sixth Army Headquarters moved abruptly to the hulking Univermag Department Store on Red Square. The buildings around the square were just shells—windowless, pocked with gaping holes. The building housing Pravda was gutted; so were those of the City Soviet and the post office. The theater had fallen in.
Paulus went past these ruins, down a broad ramp in the Univermag courtyard, and into the basement warehouse. While aides set up a radio room for last transmissions to Manstein, the general retired to a curtained cubicle containing a cot and chair, and sagged down to rest. A barred window cast a pale light on his haggard, bearded face.
Later in the day, Arthur Schmidt stormed into Paulus’s room to announce: “Sir, the Fourteenth Armored Corps is considering capitulation. Müller [the Fourteenth Corps chief of staff] said that the troops had reached the end of their strength and that they had no ammunition left. I told him that we are aware of the situation, but that the order to continue combat was still valid and a capitulation was out of the question. Nevertheless, sir, I would suggest that you visit those generals and talk to them.”
At the NKVD prison, “those generals” were holding a meeting. “Paulus will refuse to sign a capitulation, we all know that,” stated General Schlomer, commander of the Fourteenth Corps. “But we cannot let this mass murder continue. I ask for your approval to get hold of Paulus, whereafter I shall bring the negotiations to an end acting as the new commander in chief.”
Enemy at the Gates Page 36
